Prospects in studying the human proteome

Abstract

Bioinformatic and experimental approaches to studying the human proteome, the totality of proteins of various tissues and organs, are considered. Since the proteome is dynamic, to determine its size, it is necessary to establish its width (the number of various protein species, proteoforms) and depth (the number of copies of each proteoform in a tissue). The quantity of proteoforms that form because of alternative splicing processes and the implementation of single-nucleotide alterations (single amino-acid polymorphisms and posttranslational modifications) at the proteomic level was predicted. Experimental confirmation of the presence of proteoforms is limited by the high analytical sensitivity of proteomic technologies. The metabioinformatic approaches proposed by the authors can be used to evaluate the number of proteoforms for any group of protein-coding genes.